Doctor Who Unbound - Acts of Mercy
by the stargate time traveller
Summary: The Full Fathom Five Doctor studies what Alex Murphy has become, and is fully prepared to kill him. But will the Doctor believe Murphy has suffered enough? (Full Fathom Five universe)


I don't own Doctor Who - TV, books, or the Unbound series where this Doctor comes from. This version of the Doctor is the one played by David Collings from the audio drama 'Full Fathom Five,' where the Doctor was willing to kill anyone if the ends justified the means.

I also don't own RoboCop's franchise. This is the original version of RoboCop, who matches the original Cybermen from The Tenth Planet in the physique.

* * *

Acts of Mercy.

As he watched the so-called 'RoboCop' shoot down Clarence Boddicker and the remainder of his gang at the steel mill, though a few of the gang members were a bit cannier than they looked on the screen of the space/time visualiser he'd built into the console, the Doctor could not help but wonder what it said about humanity that they would allow people that did what Boddicker and his ilk did that would even need them to create something like RoboCop.

Cybernetic police officers?

The Doctor could well understand the concept since policing was a dangerous occupation, so it was logical for police officers who would be seriously injured to undergo such procedures to augment their bodies to make them not just stronger and faster, but virtually indestructible, though how extensive the procedure depended on the injuries, and judging from the images streaming from the visualiser, Alex Murphy was unfortunate enough to be so badly injured, it was a miracle in itself he hadn't died there and then in that abandoned warehouse.

It was just too bad the Doctor had some bad experiences with cyborgs - the Daleks, the Skarasen, and the Captain of Zanak sprang to mind, but right now he was concerned about the stance humanity was taking if they needed to create cyborgs like RoboCop, especially since it was the equivalent of fighting fire with a nuclear bomb, though this time the Doctor was cursing his own stupidity for not cleaning up the mess created when his second incarnation had fought against the Cybermen.

The Doctor had been watching this little pocket alternate timeline which had appeared in the aftermath of the Time War thanks to the absence of the Time Lords to keep such things in check for some time, and he was in two minds about it; on the one hand he could see the good that could come from a cyborg police officer since such a thing would be stronger, faster, and more capable of handling extensive damage that would kill a regular human being, but on the other hand the Doctor did not like the fact humanity was playing games with leftover Cyber-technology that had been left on Earth at various points in human history - the invasion his second incarnation and UNIT had dealt with so many years ago followed closely by the attack of Mondas had left behind plenty of technology, for instance.

While he had to agree that the technology of the Cybermen could be put to worthwhile use, nine times out of eleven the chances were someone or some races would go too far with the technology and end up repeating Mondas's mistakes. It was so rare he actually found a society willing to put the technology to safe use instead of simply trying to create a new form of Cyberman based on their own image, and it had reached the point where the Doctor had simply decided to go out of his way to destroy any sign a race had either scavenged the Cybermen's technology and tried to copy it which would lead to the end of their civilisations.

Why should Earth be an exception? He didn't want to see Humans go through the same mess which culminated in the loss of Mondas. No, they were sometimes skirting so close to their own destruction, with nuclear weapons, their never-ending internal fights where nothing was achieved, and how they were always on a knife-edge with each other, he didn't want them to make things worse, and the creation of an army of cyber-enhanced humans would do just that.

To make matters worse, he had already seen it happen when the TARDIS accidentally fell through a crack in the Time Vortex and he'd ended up nearly stranded on a parallel world which was nearly identical to his own Earth, but the computer technology was slightly more advanced to the point where the human brain was connected to a network of computers in an invasive manner, controlled by a multinational corporation called Cybus Industries.

The Doctor had helped a small group known as the Preachers defeat the rise of a new form of Cyberman who were similar to the ones he had dealt with in the past, especially since those Cybermen were the result of experiments where the scientists had access to more materials and resources Mondas simply hadn't been able to provide. And it had all been because of a crippled man whose body was dying on him, but the problem was John Lumic was a lot like Davros. He had created something which had incredible applications which were good in theory but had developed megalomaniac issues along the way.

When he had returned, the Doctor had scoured time and space to see if there were any signs of humanity developing their own Cybermen, and worriedly he had found it.

The point was if a parallel Earth could create a race of Cybermen, it could very well happen here and besides, on his Earth, they would have the means to duplicate the Cyber-technology; it had been littered around Earth with each no attack, particularly during the Doctor's first two lives, but because of complicated circumstances he hadn't been able to do anything to the mess left behind in his wake.

Worriedly, and truthfully the Doctor wasn't sure if he should be surprised or not, he had found what he was looking for; he had quickly discounted the so-called Bionic Man and Woman, Steve Austin and Jaime Sommers, two ordinary people who had been badly injured in some manner, and they had been augmented with bionic technology, technology which the Doctor's research hinted strongly as being based on the Cybermen's own bionics, but it was very rudimentary, but advanced for the period.

The Doctor had discounted them as a potential risk, though he had decided to continue monitoring the situation from afar rather than getting involved directly in case he became stuck in the timeline, not pleasant at all so he couldn't risk it. The real reason he didn't bother interfering with the lives of the couple was because their activities were actually doing some good, and while there were a few timelines that split away from that event, where Jaime Sommers would have been given her bionics in the 21st century rather than the 20th, for instance, though he felt that one was riskier so he had negated it, the original actually seemed better to him though he would have to see how things went in time.

The Doctor really did not like the number of alternative timeline possibilities that came from Ms Sommers, but there was little he could do about it except mitigate the effects it had on the universe, something he really missed of the Time Lords who would have ensured the possibilities were far from the main timeline.

Meanwhile he was more concerned about Alex Murphy, otherwise known as RoboCop, though why he was given that name, the Doctor simply did not understand, but it was the way Alex Murphy, a man who had once had a loving wife and son, had his life whitewashed until there was nothing else except a broken, mutilated body encased in a cybernetic shell, having to live off of a life support system while his brain had been rewritten until his human self had been virtually buried that he didn't like.

He understood the reasons, of course, but that did not mean he liked it.

With the visualiser, the Doctor had witnessed as the new 'RoboCop' appeared in Detroit, taking everyone by surprise though his former self's partner had quickly connected the dots about the true identity of the cyborg. It wasn't long before RoboCop had quickly brought down the crime rate, and granted, while the Doctor found the cyborg violent in certain circumstances such as when he had fired his gun at the groin of a rapist, or when he had punched a man through a window which smashed the man's skull even if he deserved it, he understood certain measures such as that were often required.

The Doctor wasn't particularly surprised when he had witnessed Alex Murphy's partially submerged personality return with a vengeance - some aspects of Murphy had been evident in RoboCop's early days, such as his desire to uphold the law, that gun spinning trick Murphy had been practicing before the gruesome assault his body had suffered, indicating that OCP wasn't as smart as they liked to think they were if they thought their conditioning was strong enough to permanently submerge Alex Murphy in RoboCop's mind, but then any organisation with delusions of grandeur who used cyber-technology in that manner didn't have much sense at all.

He watched on the visualiser as RoboCop studied his past before he had gone to OCP shortly after the death of Bob Morton, the man who had come up with the RoboCop concept, to arrest Richard Jones, only to discover the corrupt director had anticipated such an action, and RoboCop's systems had nearly shut down.

As he watched the events play out, the Doctor wondered what he should do about this. While RoboCop was clearly of Earth construction, there were too many similarities linking Murphy to that of the Cybermen, and while he was impressed by human ingenuity once more, the Doctor was still worried. It was clear the scientists and engineers involved with the project had no idea where their materials had come from, but the Doctor had to admit they had been smart to include additional features the Cybermen hadn't included in their own design. In this case, he wondered if ignorance was indeed bliss.

It wouldn't take much to take what Murphy could do right now, pervert it and use it as an excuse to create a new cyborg race.

The Doctor was just worried about the conditioning Murphy had undergone, and he wondered if that was responsible for the way RoboCop had acted once or twice over the period he had been operational, but he quickly discounted it. There were too many explanations for what had happened to Alex Murphy to make RoboCop investigate who he was, but the Doctor didn't care about that; he was just relieved Murphy had resurfaced.

As he started to pace around the console room trying to think of what he should be doing, the Doctor went over what he knew about RoboCop. The cybernetics Murphy was using was definitely based on the Cybermen's design, and the strength itself was definitely at the level of what Cybermen were capable of, and while there were concerns in the Time Lord's mind about the emotional state of Murphy… he was going to let the cyborg go, _for now_, but he would continue to monitor the reverse-engineering of Cyber-technology on Earth.

So far, the Doctor hadn't found any evidence to determine if the bionic surgeries undertaken by Jaime Summers and Steve Austin in the 1970s in the unchanged part of the new timeline which had unfolded without Gallifrey's presence to ensure such alterations didn't happen, and while RoboCop was certainly the logical step in the development of cybernetic augmentation, the Doctor decided to wait and see what came of this new timeline before he decided what he was going to do with it. He already had it figured out, he just hoped he would like what he found.

* * *

It seems even this Doctor is capable of mercy.

Anyway, what do you think?


End file.
